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48snickerson Tesla market share in US drops to lowest since 2017

No, it’s not anymore.

https://www.focus2move.com/world-car-market/

48snickerson Ray and Tom Magliozzi, MIT 1999 Commencement Address [video]

This was my grad school commencement. One thing that really stuck out was how many folks I knew where either themselves or their families complained about the Car Talk guys giving commencement instead of some head of state or what have you. Ray and Tom’s speech was thoroughly entertaining and humble.

48snickerson Google will blur explicit image results for all users, requires login to disable

Yes. Emphasis state. Recently passed AADC legislation (Age Appropriate Design Code for the UK) and CA-AADC (same thing, California) are going to make these kinds of design patterns common.

48snickerson Google will blur explicit image results for all users, requires login to disable

With the passing of the Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) in the UK and the California Age Appropriate Design Code expect to see this is a general design pattern across the internet.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio.... https://californiaaadc.com/

48snickerson Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

Part of the disconnect here is that the oft-repeated claims of how many miles have been safely driven by FSD versus humans is a bullshit number. Nearly every mile driven by FSD was driven by FSD AND a human that had to take the wheel when FSD failed.

48snickerson What would you pay for autonomous driving? Volkswagen hopes $8.50 per hour

> In studies of willingness to pay for autonomous driving, the range tends to be $1,000–$7,000, which would buy you between 120–820 hours on Volkswagen’s plan. In 2018, commuters drove an average of 225 hours per year. Drivers typically value their time at 20–40 percent of their wages, and given that the average American wage is around $52,000 per year, or about $26 per hour, Volkswagen isn’t necessarily being unreasonable with its pricing.

The price may or may not be correct, but it doesn't appear to be fabricated out of pure intuition. It seems good to see an alternative pricing option on the table to Tesla's current single, up-front purchase price. As more players enter the market, some amount of economics should finally start to take hold such that the right price and model emerges. As they say, you have to start somewhere.

All of that said, at some level it feels like cars are headed to a place where autonomous driving is no longer an option, but an inseparable feature to the concept of owning a car. At that point, are you subscribing to the car or are you subscribing to the autonomous driving system?

48snickerson Redefining what a map can be with new information and AI

This is the opposite of a map. A map helps you build a mental model for how you navigate space by showing you a broad view of the land, potentially enabling you to navigate to anywhere. This offloads the effort of learning, such that you don’t learn to navigate the space yourself, and only gets you from one point to another.

48snickerson Why are so many athletics records falling?

This is article is pretty light on details. There may be many reasons for the recent spat of records (most of the ones mentioned, btw, are regional), but the shoes are definitely a big contributor.

It's worth noting that 9(!) world records in track and field were set in 2020 (https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/). Two of those were not on the track (pole vault, shot), and thee were set by a single individual (Cheptegei). I'm too lazy to try to dig up and chart the historical record progressions, but that does seem like a fair blip.

Myself, and virtually every competitive runner that I know at the amateur level, has invested in so called "super shoes" from one of the various manufacturers, with impressive (relative) results- generally, everyone has PR'd since the switch. Aside from that small sample set, numerous other studies have shown that the shoes deliver: - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-v... - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1024-z

At the end of the day, none of these shoes is actually giving you any energy for free- they're just much less lossy than the previous generation of shoes. This feels like the right direction of progress to me.

48snickerson Apple Silicon and losing our legacy

Why is the concern focused on new silicon? Doesn't this problem occur (more often?) as a side effect of software being updated?

48snickerson Yield Curve Is More Inverted Than at This Point in Run-Up to Financial Crisis

According to the article, there has only been one false positive, back in 1965. Not sure how many inversions have occurred.

48snickerson DoD: Turn Off Your Fitbit, Garmin, Apple Watch GPS

So you'd propose jamming the GPS satellite broadcast signals? That would pretty much just break GPS for everything nearby. Or do you mean just outbound communication from wrist devices? How are you going to prevent people from just going home with their Apple/Garmin watches and connecting/uploading from there (which is, presumably, what they already do)?

48snickerson Amazon Dark Patterns

Deleting older reviews isn't the only mechanism for handling stale reviews. They could add a decay function to the weighting in average review rating and leave the contents of the original review in place, for example. New versions of products could be treated as unique products, and thus reviews could be forked.

48snickerson Nike Says Its $250 Running Shoes Will Make You Run Much Faster

I'm surprised they didn't compare the Vaporfly 4% to two other shoes: the Nike Zoom Fly and the Reebok Floatride Run Fast. The former is an identical shoe, but with the Pebax replaced with another foam (Lunarlon?). The latter is another Pebax foam shoe, but in a different form factor. That way they could tease out of it is the material or the shoe design.

48snickerson [dead]

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/25/us/denny-s-restaurants-to...

http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-25/news/mn-62027_1_civil...

Alas, the actual examples aren't fully enumerated (to the tune of some 4,500 complaints). The syntax of "slow service" in the cited examples is in seating customers.

48snickerson How and Why Athletes Go Broke (2009)

The NFL already does: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-nfl-training-camp-tur...

48snickerson Should we build lots more housing in San Francisco?

The reasons outlined on that thread are very specific to the Los Angeles area. Not that crazy regulations don't exist in SF, but the car-centric parking space regulations in Los Angeles are a huge part of the outlined cost. I don't think that applies broadly.

48snickerson Coconut oil isn't healthy and it's never been healthy

I'm interested in this as well.

So far, all I've found is some research that artificially lowering LDL or raising HDL may not show clear correlation to lower heart disease risk- not quite the same thing as saying LDL isn't generally correlated to heart disease risk:

Broad overview:

  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cholesterol-conundrum/

Studies references (but not cited) in the article above:

  http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0801608

  http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1107579

48snickerson A laptop ban would be a disruptive privacy risk

These guys did a pretty good job explaining why not: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-paper...

It's the profiling part that's the problem- you can determine through trial and error if you are likely to be interviewed, and adjust your resources accordingly. As noted in the paper, the 9/11 hijackers appeared to do exactly that.

Completely random interviews can't be gamed the same way.

48snickerson Millennials are still not getting married

It's a myth that 50% of marriages end in divorce. The fact that it is accepted to be true by so many people, however, may support your hypothesis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/health/divorce-rate-its-no...

and mhurron beat me to the punch...

48snickerson French Uber drivers have created their own Uber

From the article: "The geolocalized app offers the same basic services as Uber; users can hail black cars, rate their drivers, and drink free bottled water."

Does the app also remove drivers with consistently low ratings from the system? From where I stand, _that_ is the killer feature of Uber. In the early days, I was happy to pay a premium to Uber not to put up with the typical crap you get from cabbies in Los Angeles. For example, swearing the entire duration of a cab ride from LAX to El Segundo or Manhattan Beach because they were hoping to go for a longer ride.

I've never had an Uber or Lyft driver that was anything but pleasant to talk to.

48snickerson Honda's New Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle Feels More Like a Real Car

I didn't imply that at all. It isn't clear to me _what_ infrastructure should be built, given that there's not a solution that can service everyone currently. I think a case can be made for hydrogen being a better infrastructure play than extending the electric grid. It has some nice qualities, for example the ability (noted in the linked article) to be produced in a hyper-distributed manner.

48snickerson Honda's New Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle Feels More Like a Real Car

> We already have a existing electrical infrastructure and the reality is that most people aren't driving 400 miles every single day, so don't need to be constantly refueling.

For the millions of people that rent in high density buildings and work in office buildings, there typically is no charging infrastructure available either at home or work. Sure, the buildings are wired to the grid, but putting enough chargers to support a volume greater than first-adopters is extremely expensive. In the office building I work in (40 stories), there are exactly two chargers to support approximately 1000 parked cars. In the building I live in, there are exactly zero chargers, and there are no wall outlets either. Not an uncommon scenario. I'm not arguing that hydrogen is the solution to this scarcity problem, just that the existing infrastructure isn't adequate either.

48snickerson Ask HN: Is it sane to ask for a non Apple PC when starting at startup?

All our developers are on macs, but not all are on OSX. Plenty use Linux. As a practical matter, sysops needs to plan on older hardware being reallocated to other users/uses in the long run. It's nice to have the flexibility to reallocate machines that can run more or less any OS when that day comes.

48snickerson High-School Dropouts and College Grads Are Moving to Very Different Places

Not helping: I think they've done an exceptionally poor job of clarifying how they defined the metropolitan areas. For example, the label for the data in the Boston area (lifted off the map, which was the only place I could find the slightest mention) is "Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH". Grouping MA and NH?! Conversely, Riverside and Los Angeles are separated despite covering a similar geographic range. I'd love to see the geographic regions in this study shown as polygons on a map, along with some sense of the total population per region.

48snickerson California Arrests the Owner of a Revenge Porn Site

The charges in this specific case are blackmail. I don't think this has anything to do with viewpoints or consent.

http://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-kamal...

48snickerson [dead]

I imagine there's plenty of prior art supporting invalidating the Hillis patent, if it came to that.

For example, 1997: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/metadesk/

1:30 in the video seems to show the behavior described.